Refocus!?

As mentioned on another website, Pentax are predicted to be amongst the first to offer this on their cameras in 2008!

http://www.refocusimaging.com/home/

Just had a quick look, and all I can say is WOW!

If this is definately in the K20D (or whatever it is), you can place my order now Chris!

I've had a quick look and it doesn't explain how it'd cope with anything other than whatever the standard focal length of their "digital lens" is - as such as you stick either a wide angle or telephoto lens in front of it then unless you always shoot at minimum aperture (with the associated problems that brings) then any effect is going to be limited.

I can see the benefit for point and shoots (using digital zoom) but I'm not convinced it's all that applicable to SLR type cameras.

Looks like bracketed focussing combined with psuedo-video to me. Rapidly shoot a number of frames whilst moving focus slightly between frames. You'd simply select which frame/frames you'd like to keep.

Well, that's how I'd do it anyway, but nobody asked me.

Check out this thread where I've mentioned it before (Maybe Pentax really do listen to us).

Of course there will be technical hurdles to overcome, but that's somebody else's job.

As you say, bracketed focussing would be very useful if they could do it.

Most definitely not
I remember looking at this a while back - it's extremely complicated and is completely different to what you would consider "normal"
As far as they say - you can achieve it with a different type of micro-lens on the CCD.
You end up with a garbled image at the sensor that you have to unscramble in software. It's the process of "unscrambling" the information that allows for re-focus - a very complex deconvolution function.

I did look at the maths... can't remember it, but it's very interesting and has some interesting practical applications.

Matt

More information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenoptic_camera
http://www.studiolighting.net/refocus-imaging-previews-digital-lens/

Plenoptic camera (or Light Field Camera) is what you need to know

It'll cook your brain... and if it's on a Pentax then there'll be a few bits of Pentax gear of mine up for sale to fund it

Matt

There's also these:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/lfcamera-150dpi.pdf
http://www.cfar.umd.edu/~jneumann/videogeometry/polydioptric.htm
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/

The snag is that the 16 mega pixels of the sensor are only down to 90,000 microlenses. So you get lower effective resolution - because the distance information is spread across multiple sensor sites.

At least that's how I read it.... I could be wrong of course
Matt

I read up on that a while back also.
the software should make it possible to eliminate all types of ca as well as refocus.

So, worth having then? ..............

I think you're right.
It seems to me as if the sensor is split if you like, and the image is recorded well, quite a few times - the quality of the images on the refocus website are very low res, low quality, and none of them sharp

It doesnt really interest me if im honest, I dont see the problem with focusing, especially when its not even manual.

Oh, and good luck when it does come out carrying round memory cards with you - if you can store about 150 RAWs on a 2GB card, then you wont be able to store many refocus pictures

I had a brief look through this PDF earlier too - I thought it was all just a hoax to start with, but it certainly seems not to be.

I see it as a start, rather than a snag. According to Wikipedia, the first commercially available (I use the word 'available' loosely - apparently it was $30,000) dSLR was only 1.3 MP.

I wonder what the lower limit of the size of the microlenses is, though, and whether it's small enough to eventually catch up with and pass the sort of resolutions we see now.

To get a 6mp image out of it, good enough for printing however, the sensor would have to be ridiculously big!

Think on the terms of, large format version of a digital camera, increased in size!